The True Meaning of Christmas
I thought that today, as my gift to everyone in this wonderful sub, it would be nice to take a moment and go through the Christmas story together.
It all starts in the Roman Republic, with a holiday known as Saturnalia. The Romans had stolen Saturnalia from neighboring Germanic tribes and renamed the God Yule to Saturn, as a way of keeping their frontiers pacified. This was a strategy they used over and over, as we will see.
Well, one year, they were having some trouble in their Jewish province. The exceptional Roman record keeping from this era actually lists hundreds of names, both of troublemaking Jews, and of potential collaborators. The Roman bureaucrat in charge of maintaining this list was Nicholas of Anatolia.
Nicholas took his list to Pontius Pilate, who realized that the best way to keep the Jews happy would be to invent a religion centered around one of their own. Together, Nicholas and Pilate used a standard dying-rising God myth, cobbled together from legends of Mithras and Osiris (among others.) They called their creation Jesus, and within a few years, had convinced a sizable portion of the population that he existed.
For a long time, the plan worked beautifully. The Jewish converts never realized that they'd been taken in by a Roman psy-ops campaign, and that their original Volcano religion had been supplanted by a fabrication. In fact, this plan worked so well that for the next hundred years, there were only two major Jewish Wars.
Unfortunately for the Romans, their plan worked too well. Christianity was so successful that it burned down the Library of Alexandria, setting the Roman Space Program back by hundreds of years. It was a blow the Empire would not recover from. For the next milenium, Christianity would be a stumbling block to science, preventing the entire world from moving forward technologically.
However, our Christmas tale ends on a happy note. For you see, a young devout Catholic landscape painter by the name of Adolf Hitler managed to trick France and England into starting an unjust war (having studied the American War of Northern Aggression) and then invaded Russia in the winter. The ensuing battle of Stalingrad lasted from 1941-1945, and was the only significant battle of the war. When it finished, all of Europe swore off religion, and became socialist paradises dedicated to science.
And that kids, is how Neil Degrasse Tyson saved Christmas.
Originally posted in r/badhistory
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